Weekly Dev Blog – 5th & 12th April

2017·04·12by smw3

Easter is Here!

Easter event has started. Be sure to pay a visit to the Easter Warren Sector off Sol!

Jeff

Jeff added some equipment that new players can purchase in Mutara Gardens as well as an asteroid belt with an AI miner flying about. The miner is not just there to liven up the place: The Volcom side of the Nexus is meant to be a bit of a puzzler, with the miner acting as a hint on how to get rid of that pesky asteroid blocking the wormhole to the next galaxy. In general, Jeff is not very happy with how the Volcom starting zone currently is. Rather than fighting random cadets everywhere, there should be more puzzles and challenges.

AI can now have multiple engagement sounds. Even the most diehard of Volcom pirates needs some variety in their vocabulary other than “Yarrrr!”.

Bobbo

Bobbo found bugs and presumably fixed many.

He has also added some important details to item descriptions, such as the amount of space the items in a crate will take up, or whether a laser is ethereal or not.

s_m_w

I’ve expanded the damage meter to show individual sources. Not quite perfect, as parasites injected by missiles and such count as the player’s damage, but it’s still far more detailed than what we had before!

And it also works for healing!

On an unrelated note: Samgrahaka Bhisajvars are REALLY good. This was a test with 7 of them in a 3 gen ops setup.

I’ve also finished the next, and hopefully final, pass on Torpedoes and Thoraxes. Most importantly: Torpedo I, II and III are no longer the worst weapons in the entire game. In fact, torpedoes in general got changed: Their niche is now high DPS, low DPE weaponry. There are very few torpedoes to experiment with at the higher techs currently (mostly due to how bad torpedoes were in general), but that’ll change over time.

Since it’s going to come up: The Zebra Hooves Torpedoe got changed quite a bit. The reasoning is simple: The hallmark of the physical damage type is high DPE. For non-physical torpedoes to be in line with the ZHT (DPE of 0.4), they’d have to have far lower DPE (in the range of 0.25 and less! Torpedoes of large size classes would be approaching 0.1!), which simply didn’t work.

While the ZHT itself did lose some of its burstiness, it did inspire the general idea of what torpedoes should look like.

Jey

Last week has seen a pretty large server performance improvement, much larger than what was expected from this change! It came with a few new item related problems but all those should be fixed now. This is the reason why there hasn’t been any real update since last week, I did not want to add new things on the server when it was in an unstable state. Now that the server is a bit more stable, patching will resume later this week.

Thank you to everyone who’s been clicking yes when they crash, all those dumps are providing me with a lot of data to fix the crashes. A client patch for those I found should be available on beta in the coming days and hopefully will become the live client with the patch coming up.

Hober Mallow

Fixed Shielding 22, I kept the boss at a 30 second cycle timer because anything more made it far less exciting. The timer wasn’t the issue, it was the insane healing the boss got from seemingly out of nowhere. The boss is now less of a spank fest, and you’re less likely to kill it inside of a single damage type rotation. Killing the spawns is much more important than it previously was.

There are now Combined Augmenter blueprint packs for sale in Augmenter Labs inside of The Acropolis, this should make building the Lyceum Combined Augmenters a much more reasonable and feasible task. This means that the blueprints will no longer drop from AI.

Assault Dropships, from the Assault Behemoth, have been reworked and are now close range and tanky fighters. A non Fleet Commander user can only deploy 2. They should be really interesting.

Updated the player progress missions for Tech 21 and Tech 22 skills, they are now much more specific and no longer mislead the player about what they need to do in order to level their skills up.

In regards to Subspace Invasion, I am working on a system where you won’t have to kill Outposts for monthly missions rewards, you will instead be killing invading Motherships instead. These will spawn at the beginning of the Invasion, and I’ll move a big chunk of the rewards away from Outposts into Motherships. It will still be worthwhile to kill Outposts, I don’t intend to take that away from players.

Ryan & Pixel

Pixel has been hard at work updating the various guides on the SS website.